Jenkins on Ichiuji

By Mark Jenkins

I'm wondering if anyone else has found Melissa Ichiuji's "36 hours" a little unsettling in its aftermath.

Weening herself from cellphones, and TV, etc... I can see as a return to a more animal nature. I'm all for that. As for fasting, and cutting off social contact with friends, peeing in public, that's where it gets a little gray.

While the peeing part might be animal (I suppose), cutting off social contact while sitting on a corner on a platform and not talking to anyone seems to make yourself like an animal at the zoo with people gawking at you.

I too, came by, maybe to gawk, or to watch other people gawking; and anything done outside in the name of art outside (physically at least) of the institutions always gets my curiousity up. But upon arriving I discovered that she had left.

Just a note that said that she was ill. She'd left and taken her pee jars with her!

And in the aftermath, in my own comic way that amuses me if no one else, I sat on her empty perch and ate a hot dog, and when a few people came up and asked where she was I responded, "She's sick."



They looked a little concerned, disheartened, and sweaty (like me) after having made the walk over from their workplaces.

Ultimately, I think she's a caricature of our own inner selves who, seeing the ever increasing trash of technology, turns its absence into a treasure. But the catch is that even while seeking it you can't seek it purely.

One of Dostoevsky's characters said something profound once that I remembered. Something to the extent that modern man has become diffuse in his thoughts; he can no longer think a sole thought but always has several competing interests to contend with.

Buddhist monks would agree. And I'm sure probably wouldn't have given her a high chance at reaching any sort of success in this small amount of time. And of course there was the congential defect in her mission, that even while she fasted, and weened, her website blinked, (and blinks now) about Washington Post coverage and in the back of her mind, she was thinking...